Steve ran toward the sound. In the scant shadow of the community center, a Kumaji was resting. He was a withered old man, all skin and bones and sweat-stiffened tunic, with enormous red-rimmed eyes. His purple skin, which had been blasted by the merciless sun, was almost black. Steve held the canteen to his lips and watched his throat working almost spasmodically to get the water down. After a while Steve withdrew the canteen and said: "What happened here?" "They're gone. All gone." "Yes, but what happened?" "The Kumaji--" "You're Kumaji." "This is my town," the old man said. "I lived with the Earthmen. Now they're gone." "But you stayed here--" "To die," the old man said, without self-pity. "I'm too old to flee, too old to fight, too old for anything but death. More water." * * * * * Steve gave him another drink. "You still haven't told me what happened." Actually, though, Steve could guess. With the twenty-second century Earth population hovering at the eleven billion mark, colonies were sought everywhere. Even on a parched desert wasteland like this. The Kumaji tribesmen had never accepted the colony as a fact of their life on the desert, and in a way Steve could not blame them. It meant one oasis less for their own nomadic sustenance. When Steve was a boy, Kumaji raids were frequent. At school on Earth and Luna he'd read about the raids, how they'd increased in violence, how the Earth government, so far away and utterly unable to protect its distant colony, had suggested withdrawal from the Kumaji desert settlement, especially since a colony could exist there under only the most primitive conditions, almost like the purple-skinned Kumaji natives themselves. "When did it happen?" Steve demanded. "Last night." It was now midafternoon. "Three folks died," the Kumaji said in his almost perfect English, "from the poisoning of the well. The well was the last straw. The colonists had no choice. They had to go, and go fast, taking what little water they had left in the houses." "Will they try to walk all the way through to Oasis City?" Oasis City, built at the confluence of two underground rivers which came to the surface there and flowed the rest of the way to the sea above ground, was almost five hundred miles from the colony. Five hundred miles of trackless sands and hundred-and-thirty-degree heat.... "They have to," the old man said. "And they have to hurry. Men, women and children. The Kumaji are after them." * * * * * Steve felt irrational hatred then. He thought it would help if he could find some of the nomadic tribesmen and kill them. It might help the way he felt, he knew, but it certainly wouldn't help the fleeing colonists, trekking across a parched wilderness--to the safety of Oasis City--or death. "Come on," Steve said, making up his mind. "The unicopter can hold two in a pinch." "You're going after them?"